THE whole sky had been overcast with rain-clouds from early morning; it
was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey dull weather when
the clouds have been hanging over the country for a long while, when
one expects rain and it does not come. Ivan Ivanovitch, the veterinary
surgeon, and Burkin, the high-school teacher, were already tired from
walking, and the fields seemed to them endless. Far ahead of them they
could just see the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe; on the
right stretched a row of hillocks which disappeared in the distance
behind the village, and they both knew that this was the bank of the
river, that there were meadows, green willows, homesteads there, and
that if one stood on one of the hillocks one could see from it the same
vast plain, telegraph-wires, and a train which in the distance looked
like a crawling caterpillar, and that in clear weather one could even
see the town. Now, in still weather, when all nature seemed mild
and dreamy, Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were filled with love of that
countryside, and both thought how great, how beautiful a land it was.
“Last time we were in Prokofy’s barn,” said Burkin, “you were about to
tell me a story.”
“Yes; I meant to tell you about my brother.”
Ivan Ivanovitch heaved a deep sigh and lighted a pipe to begin to tell
his story, but just at that moment the rain began. And five minutes
later heavy rain came down, covering the sky, and it was hard to tell
when it would be over. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin stopped in hesitation;
the dogs, already drenched, stood with their tails between their legs
gazing at them feelingly.
“We must take shelter somewhere,” said Burkin. “Let us go to Alehin’s;
it’s close by.”
“Come along.”
They turned aside and walked through mown fields, sometimes going
straight forward, sometimes turning to the right, till they came out on
the road. Soon they saw poplars, a garden, then the red roofs of barns;
there was a gleam of the river, and the view opened on to a broad
expanse of water with a windmill and a white bath-house: this was
Sofino, where Alehin lived.
The watermill was at work, drowning the sound of the rain; the dam was
shaking. Here wet horses with drooping heads were standing near their
carts, and men were walking about covered with sacks. It was damp,
muddy, and desolate; the water looked cold and malignant. Ivan
Ivanovitch and Burkin were already conscious of a feeling of wetness,
messiness, and discomfort all over; their feet were heavy with mud, and
when, crossing the dam, they went up to the barns, they were silent, as
though they were angry with one another.
In one of the barns there was the sound of a winnowing machine, the door
was open, and clouds of dust were coming from it. In the doorway was
standing Alehin himself, a man of forty, tall and stout, with long hair,
more like a professor or an artist than a landowner. He had on a white
shirt that badly needed washing, a rope for a belt, drawers instead of
trousers, and his boots, too, were plastered up with mud and straw. His
eyes and nose were black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanovitch and
Burkin, and was apparently much delighted to see them.
“Go into the house, gentlemen,” he said, smiling; “I’ll come directly,
this minute.”
It was a big two-storeyed house. Alehin lived in the lower storey, with
arched ceilings and little windows, where the bailiffs had once lived;
here everything was plain, and there was a smell of rye bread, cheap
vodka, and harness. He went upstairs into the best rooms only on rare
occasions, when visitors came. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were met in
the house by a maid-servant, a young woman so beautiful that they both
stood still and looked at one another.
“You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you, my friends,” said
Alehin, going into the hall with them. “It is a surprise! Pelagea,” he
said, addressing the girl, “give our visitors something to change into.
And, by the way, I will change too. Only I must first go and wash, for
I almost think I have not washed since spring. Wouldn’t you like to come
into the bath-house? and meanwhile they will get things ready here.”
Beautiful Pelagea, looking so refined and soft, brought them towels and
soap, and Alehin went to the bath-house with his guests.
“It’s a long time since I had a wash,” he said, undressing. “I have got
a nice bath-house, as you see--my father built it--but I somehow never
have time to wash.”
He sat down on the steps and soaped his long hair and his neck, and the
water round him turned brown.
“Yes, I must say,” said Ivan Ivanovitch meaningly, looking at his head.
“It’s a long time since I washed...” said Alehin with embarrassment,
giving himself a second soaping, and the water near him turned dark
blue, like ink.
Ivan Ivanovitch went outside, plunged into the water with a loud splash,
and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out wide. He stirred the water
into waves which set the white lilies bobbing up and down; he swam to
the very middle of the millpond and dived, and came up a minute later
in another place, and swam on, and kept on diving, trying to touch the
bottom.
“Oh, my goodness!” he repeated continually, enjoying himself thoroughly.
“Oh, my goodness!” He swam to the mill, talked to the peasants there,
then returned and lay on his back in the middle of the pond, turning his
face to the rain. Burkin and Alehin were dressed and ready to go, but he
still went on swimming and diving. “Oh, my goodness!...” he said. “Oh,
Lord, have mercy on me!...”
“That’s enough!” Burkin shouted to him.
They went back to the house. And only when the lamp was lighted in the
big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in
silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in arm-chairs;
and Alehin, washed and combed, in a new coat, was walking about the
drawing-room, evidently enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry
clothes, and light shoes; and when lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly
on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and jam on a tray--only
then Ivan Ivanovitch began on his story, and it seemed as though not
only Burkin and Alehin were listening, but also the ladies, young and
old, and the officers who looked down upon them sternly and calmly from
their gold frames.
“There are two of us brothers,” he began--“I, Ivan Ivanovitch, and my
brother, Nikolay Ivanovitch, two years younger. I went in for a learned
profession and became a veterinary surgeon, while Nikolay sat in
a government office from the time he was nineteen. Our father,
Tchimsha-Himalaisky, was a kantonist, but he rose to be an officer and
left us a little estate and the rank of nobility. After his death the
little estate went in debts and legal expenses; but, anyway, we had
spent our childhood running wild in the country. Like peasant children,
we passed our days and nights in the fields and the woods, looked after
horses, stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so on.... And,
you know, whoever has once in his life caught perch or has seen the
migrating of the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float in flocks
over the village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman,
and will have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother
was miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went on
sitting in the same place, went on writing the same papers and thinking
of one and the same thing--how to get into the country. And this
yearning by degrees passed into a definite desire, into a dream of
buying himself a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a
lake.
“He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but I
never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the rest of
his life in a little farm of his own. It’s the correct thing to say
that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what
a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our
intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm,
it’s a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of
earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life,
to retreat and bury oneself in one’s farm--it’s not life, it’s egoism,
laziness, it’s monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good
works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole
globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities
and peculiarities of his free spirit.
“My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of how he
would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole yard with such a
savoury smell, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit
for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the
forest. Gardening books and the agricultural hints in calendars were
his delight, his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading
newspapers, too, but the only things he read in them were the
advertisements of so many acres of arable land and a grass meadow with
farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and millponds, for
sale. And his imagination pictured the garden-paths, flowers and fruit,
starling cotes, the carp in the pond, and all that sort of thing, you
know. These imaginary pictures were of different kinds according to the
advertisements which he came across, but for some reason in every one
of them he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine a
homestead, he could not picture an idyllic nook, without gooseberries.
“‘Country life has its conveniences,’ he would sometimes say. ‘You sit
on the verandah and you drink tea, while your ducks swim on the pond,
there is a delicious smell everywhere, and... and the gooseberries are
growing.’
“He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there were
the same things--(a) house for the family, (b) servants’ quarters, (c)
kitchen-garden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He lived parsimoniously, was
frugal in food and drink, his clothes were beyond description; he looked
like a beggar, but kept on saving and putting money in the bank. He grew
fearfully avaricious. I did not like to look at him, and I used to give
him something and send him presents for Christmas and Easter, but he
used to save that too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea there is no
doing anything with him.
“Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He was over
forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the papers and
saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same object of
buying a farm and having gooseberries, he married an elderly and ugly
widow without a trace of feeling for her, simply because she had filthy
lucre. He went on living frugally after marrying her, and kept her short
of food, while he put her money in the bank in his name.
“Her first husband had been a postmaster, and with him she was
accustomed to pies and home-made wines, while with her second husband
she did not get enough black bread; she began to pine away with this
sort of life, and three years later she gave up her soul to God. And I
need hardly say that my brother never for one moment imagined that he
was responsible for her death. Money, like vodka, makes a man queer. In
our town there was a merchant who, before he died, ordered a plateful
of honey and ate up all his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so
that no one might get the benefit of it. While I was inspecting cattle
at a railway-station, a cattle-dealer fell under an engine and had
his leg cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, the blood was
flowing--it was a horrible thing--and he kept asking them to look for
his leg and was very much worried about it; there were twenty roubles in
the boot on the leg that had been cut off, and he was afraid they would
be lost.”
“That’s a story from a different opera,” said Burkin.
“After his wife’s death,” Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking for
half a minute, “my brother began looking out for an estate for himself.
Of course, you may look about for five years and yet end by making a
mistake, and buying something quite different from what you have dreamed
of. My brother Nikolay bought through an agent a mortgaged estate
of three hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family,
with servants’ quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no
gooseberry-bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the water in
it was the colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was
a brickyard and on the other a factory for burning bones. But Nikolay
Ivanovitch did not grieve much; he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes,
planted them, and began living as a country gentleman.
“Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what
it was like. In his letters my brother called his estate ‘Tchumbaroklov
Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.’ I reached ‘alias Himalaiskoe’ in the
afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges,
fir-trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the
yard, where to put one’s horse. I went up to the house, and was met by
a fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too
lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and
she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after
dinner. I went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed with a
quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks,
his nose, and his mouth all stuck out--he looked as though he might
begin grunting into the quilt at any moment.
“We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at the
thought that we had once been young and now were both grey-headed and
near the grave. He dressed, and led me out to show me the estate.
“‘Well, how are you getting on here?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.’
“He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner, a gentleman.
He was already accustomed to it, had grown used to it, and liked it. He
ate a great deal, went to the bath-house, was growing stout, was already
at law with the village commune and both factories, and was very much
offended when the peasants did not call him ‘Your Honour.’ And he
concerned himself with the salvation of his soul in a substantial,
gentlemanly manner, and performed deeds of charity, not simply, but
with an air of consequence. And what deeds of charity! He treated the
peasants for every sort of disease with soda and castor oil, and on his
name-day had a thanksgiving service in the middle of the village, and
then treated the peasants to a gallon of vodka--he thought that was
the thing to do. Oh, those horrible gallons of vodka! One day the
fat landowner hauls the peasants up before the district captain for
trespass, and next day, in honour of a holiday, treats them to a gallon
of vodka, and they drink and shout ‘Hurrah!’ and when they are drunk bow
down to his feet. A change of life for the better, and being well-fed
and idle develop in a Russian the most insolent self-conceit. Nikolay
Ivanovitch, who at one time in the government office was afraid to have
any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not gospel truth,
and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime minister. ‘Education is
essential, but for the peasants it is premature.’ ‘Corporal punishment
is harmful as a rule, but in some cases it is necessary and there is
nothing to take its place.’
“‘I know the peasants and understand how to treat them,’ he would say.
‘The peasants like me. I need only to hold up my little finger and the
peasants will do anything I like.’
“And all this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent smile. He
repeated twenty times over ‘We noblemen,’ ‘I as a noble’; obviously he
did not remember that our grandfather was a peasant, and our father
a soldier. Even our surname Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so
incongruous, seemed to him now melodious, distinguished, and very
agreeable.
“But the point just now is not he, but myself. I want to tell you about
the change that took place in me during the brief hours I spent at his
country place. In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put
on the table a plateful of gooseberries. They were not bought, but his
own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were
planted. Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed and looked for a minute in silence
at the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not speak for
excitement. Then he put one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at me with
the triumph of a child who has at last received his favourite toy, and
said:
“‘How delicious!’
“And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, ‘Ah, how delicious! Do
taste them!’
“They were sour and unripe, but, as Pushkin says:
“‘Dearer to us the falsehood that exalts
Than hosts of baser truths.’
“I saw a happy man whose cherished dream was so obviously fulfilled, who
had attained his object in life, who had gained what he wanted, who was
satisfied with his fate and himself. There is always, for some reason,
an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness,
and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by
an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly
oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my
brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept
getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I
reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! What a
suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness
of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible
poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness,
hypocrisy, lying.... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in
the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one
who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see
the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by
night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old,
serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and
we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on
somewhere behind the scenes.... Everything is quiet and peaceful, and
nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their
minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from
malnutrition.... And this order of things is evidently necessary;
evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear
their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be
impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind
the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer
continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that
however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later,
trouble will come for him--disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see
or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no
man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily
cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree--and all goes
well.
“That night I realized that I, too, was happy and contented,” Ivan
Ivanovitch went on, getting up. “I, too, at dinner and at the hunt liked
to lay down the law on life and religion, and the way to manage the
peasantry. I, too, used to say that science was light, that culture was
essential, but for the simple people reading and writing was enough
for the time. Freedom is a blessing, I used to say; we can no more do
without it than without air, but we must wait a little. Yes, I used to
talk like that, and now I ask, ‘For what reason are we to wait?’” asked
Ivan Ivanovitch, looking angrily at Burkin. “Why wait, I ask you? What
grounds have we for waiting? I shall be told, it can’t be done all at
once; every idea takes shape in life gradually, in its due time. But who
is it says that? Where is the proof that it’s right? You will fall back
upon the natural order of things, the uniformity of phenomena; but is
there order and uniformity in the fact that I, a living, thinking man,
stand over a chasm and wait for it to close of itself, or to fill up
with mud at the very time when perhaps I might leap over it or build
a bridge across it? And again, wait for the sake of what? Wait till
there’s no strength to live? And meanwhile one must live, and one wants
to live!
“I went away from my brother’s early in the morning, and ever since then
it has been unbearable for me to be in town. I am oppressed by its peace
and quiet; I am afraid to look at the windows, for there is no spectacle
more painful to me now than the sight of a happy family sitting round
the table drinking tea. I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am
not even capable of hatred; I can only grieve inwardly, feel irritated
and vexed; but at night my head is hot from the rush of ideas, and I
cannot sleep.... Ah, if I were young!”
Ivan Ivanovitch walked backwards and forwards in excitement, and
repeated: “If I were young!”
He suddenly went up to Alehin and began pressing first one of his hands
and then the other.
“Pavel Konstantinovitch,” he said in an imploring voice, “don’t be calm
and contented, don’t let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young,
strong, confident, be not weary in well-doing! There is no happiness,
and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an object
in life, that meaning and object is not our happiness, but something
greater and more rational. Do good!”
And all this Ivan Ivanovitch said with a pitiful, imploring smile, as
though he were asking him a personal favour.
Then all three sat in arm-chairs at different ends of the drawing-room
and were silent. Ivan Ivanovitch’s story had not satisfied either Burkin
or Alehin. When the generals and ladies gazed down from their gilt
frames, looking in the dusk as though they were alive, it was dreary to
listen to the story of the poor clerk who ate gooseberries. They felt
inclined, for some reason, to talk about elegant people, about women.
And their sitting in the drawing-room where everything--the
chandeliers in their covers, the arm-chairs, and the carpet under their
feet--reminded them that those very people who were now looking down
from their frames had once moved about, sat, drunk tea in this room,
and the fact that lovely Pelagea was moving noiselessly about was better
than any story.
Alehin was fearfully sleepy; he had got up early, before three o’clock
in the morning, to look after his work, and now his eyes were closing;
but he was afraid his visitors might tell some interesting story after
he had gone, and he lingered on. He did not go into the question whether
what Ivan Ivanovitch had just said was right and true. His visitors did
not talk of groats, nor of hay, nor of tar, but of something that had no
direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on.
“It’s bed-time, though,” said Burkin, getting up. “Allow me to wish you
good-night.”
Alehin said good-night and went downstairs to his own domain, while the
visitors remained upstairs. They were both taken for the night to a big
room where there stood two old wooden beds decorated with carvings, and
in the corner was an ivory crucifix. The big cool beds, which had been
made by the lovely Pelagea, smelt agreeably of clean linen.
Ivan Ivanovitch undressed in silence and got into bed.
“Lord forgive us sinners!” he said, and put his head under the quilt.
His pipe lying on the table smelt strongly of stale tobacco, and
Burkin could not sleep for a long while, and kept wondering where the
oppressive smell came from.
The rain was pattering on the window-panes all night.